Yes, Alan Does Have A Life...

It's called "agora"

Once upon a time, there was a bright (perhaps more in the sense of
"sparkling excitement" than any other) young lad who had recently
discovered the world of BBS's. A little less recently, he had studied
Unix V6(!) in his operating systems class, and thought it was The Thing.
On April 2, 1984, he joined the Wonderful World of Intel (which was
especially wonderful, as he needed the money pretty badly about then,
and they almost immediately sent him to Germany. Twice.) The implications
of "what if" he had been hired a day earlier continue to evoke amusement...

It was also not long after he started Intel, that he discovered
Scrap Sales. Sometime in 1985, although the exact date is now
lost in antiquity, he had managed to put together a Multibus I system
running Xenix-286, and
skeeve was
born. Well, OK, it didn't look like that until 1989, but that's the
earliest picture of it I have. As you can see, it benefited substantially
from the periodic scrap sale, and in particular, the donation of a small
pickup load from someone who had been going to scrap sales far longer.
His manager also kindly allowed him to borrow a few odds and ends that
were no longer being used in the group he was in, and somewhere in there,
due to a conflict in the UUCP namespace, the name was changed to agora.

By this point in time, agora was consuming enough electricity that the
apartment heat was only needed for the two weeks a year that the
temperature outside went below freezing, and air conditioning was required
in the summer (whenever the outside temperature went over 90F, the system
crashed). Thus, by the spring of 1990, with a few $120 electric bills
in the middle of summer, it was time to make the move: buy a 386 and
run SVR4. It was also about this time that a small fee became necessary
to cover the cost of the phone lines, and even though it was still purely
a hobby, there are ethical considerations when charging for access to
even partially borrowed hardware.

Ahhhhh. The relief of being able to port code without worrying about
Vax programmers who thought all pointers were integers. No more segments
(for practical purposes). Speed. Low power bills. More phone lines.

Ah yes. Phone lines. Lemmee tell you about
phone lines.
Now that our subject had SVR4, with TCP/IP and all, and there being
several other hacker sorts around town who'd been eyeing the Internet
with envy for sometime, it was time to see if something could be done
locally. RAINet was thus born in the fall of 1990, and its first connection
was a 2400 bps SLIP link between agora and parsely (another local public
access system, owned by Tod Oace at the time). Since then, RAINet, Inc. was spawned off, and the
original RAINet was referred to as FreeRAIN, though it's now pretty much
non-existant as commercial offerings have become available.

With the growth of
agora (picture
taken in early 1993), plus the growth of RAINet, plus individual voice
and fax lines, there was a peak of around 40 POTS* lines, a 56K Frame Relay
line and a T1 line into the house.

Those little boxes littering the wall. are
basically voice demultiplexors. There aren't enough physical wires into
the neighborhood, so the phone company multiplexes two voice channels
onto one pair of wires, and those boxes split the two channels back out,
often with "value added" (noise).

With the SysAdmin experience gained thus far, plus the networking
experience gained from RAINet, our intrepid explorer was able to make
the jump into a support group at his real job, helped write a mail
gateway, created the original version of www.intel.com and played with
internal web servers while getting paid for it. He went on to
work on a project to encourage multicast deployment on the Internet,
along with bandwidth reservation, so that we can all do audio and video
reliably. That morphed into a project to encrypt audio/video, which was
then spun out as a separate company. That lasted a year, then was sold
to another company that was already doing that sort of thing, and that
lasted about 6 months --- having survived the first round of layoffs at
3 months into the new company, was not so lucky the second round a few
months later.

On the plus side, he could devote his full attention to the ISP business
hoping it could be grown into something that can actually support
him for a change...unfortunately, his marketing skills didn't prove
up to the task...but more on that later.

One of the changes that this attention resulted in was moving agora
to a colocation facility in the Pittock Building in downtown
Portland with the phone lines coming into an Ascend Max 4000 terminal
server over a PRI (ISDN Primary Rate Interface --- basically 23 digital
phone lines over a single pair of copper wires). This allowed for a
speed increase for dialups from 33.6kbps to 56kbps.

Agora remained at the Pittock for a few years, then moved in with some
friends who run a web development business.

In 2004, it was clear that agora was never going to support anyone, and
having spent his savings trying, Alan moved to Corvallis to work for a
real ISP, Peak Internet. He agreed to
not compete in the same markets, and not let it interfere with Peak work.

In 2006, the friends decided to emigrate to Vancouver BC, so Agora moved
into a new location, forked.net, in
a cage in the Infinity Data Center in downtown Portland --- ironically,
nearly across the street from the Pittock where it had been not so long
before.

By 2007, the handwriting was on the wall --- dialup was fading fast, and
at the end of the year, dialup services for the handful of remaining
dialup users were moved to Peak Internet, while at the same time, work
was started on updating and modernizing the rest of the services.

From here?

Who knows...

* Definitions:

POTS

Plain Old Telephone Service, i.e. individual analog phone line.
Believe it or not, this is an industry standard acronym.